Baidu has chosen Skyscanner as its international flight search partner

When China’s number one search engine, Baidu, decides to partner with a company, it’s a really big deal. Today, Skyscanner, Europe’s biggest flight search engine, has announced a partnership which means that it will power Baidu’s international flight search.

Baidu already owns a chunk of a travel search site Qunar, which handles local flights, and Skyscanner powers searches for travel outside of the country now. It will also be opening an office in Beijing, China.

Here’s what Co-founder and CEO of Skyscanner had to say about the news:

We look forward to partnering with Baidu to provide the very best in travel search to their many users. Overall in Asia, we fully expect Skyscanner to grow to the size of our European business within a relatively short period and we are investing with this in mind.

Skyscanner is currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland, with an office in Singapore.

China is the world’s largest Internet market with over 500 million users, the firm says. Baidu’s share of those users who search is an astonishing 80%.

Skyscanner’s mobile app has had over 7M downloads in the past year, which means that travel is a huge market that it gets to infiltrate further with this partnership.